AMD shares more Radeon VII details

In addition to a few details shared during the CES 2019 keynote hosted by Dr. Lisa Su, AMD's CEO, the company has also disclosed a few more details regarding the new Radeon VII graphics card, including some of the specifications and performance.

While we have already heard promises that Radeon VII will provide 25 percent more performance at the same power, mostly thanks to the 7nm Vega GPU, as well as provide significant improvements in both content creation applications as well as certain games, compared to the Radeon RX Vega 64 and Nvidia RTX 2080, AMD has decided to tell us a little more in its official press notice.

The Radeon VII will pack 60 Compute Units (CUs), for 3840 Stream processors, and come with 16GB of HBM2 memory on a 4096-bit memory interface, leaving it with 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU is clocked at 1450MHz base clock and can boost up to 1800MHz. One thing that we are missing is the power consumption as Nvidia has offered much better performance-per-watt ratio recently.

There are some significant changes to the package due to the size of the new 7nm 2nd generation Vega GPU, and we are looking at a 331mm2 GPU, surrounded by 4GB HMB2 chips. According to AMD, it offers 1.8x gaming performance per area, 2x memory capacity and 2.1x memory bandwidth, compared to the Radeon RX Vega 64.

Although most performance slides are focusing on the so-called content creators applications like DaVinci, Premiere, Luxmark, Blender, and others, there is a single slide that compares both the RTX 2080 and RX Vega 64 to the upcoming Radeon VII.

According to the numbers provided, Radeon VII beats both of these cards in Battlefield V at 1440p Ultra settings, offers pretty much the same performance as the RTX 2080 at 3440x1440 Ultra FXAA settings in Forza Horizon 4, and beats both of those graphics cards at 2160p Ultra setting in Strange Brigade and its Vulkan API implementation.

What makes the Radeon VII interesting is its price, and while Nvidia might have the upper hand with RTX in terms of ray tracing and DLSS, which have yet to be seriously implemented in games, the Radeon VII has a $100 lower suggested retail price compared to the RTX 2080, as the price of Nvidia's RTX 2080 Founders Edition is currently $799, while AMD asks for $699, with three nice titles bundled with the card. Of course, there are some cheaper RTX 2080 versions around and Nvidia does bundle Anthem and Battlefield V with those cards so these two cards will trade blows on the market, and hopefully, competition will push those prices lower.